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Friday, November 11, 2016

Lessons For Kenya From The Trumpocalypse

To describe Donald
Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in Tuesday’s US presidential election as a
shocking upset is probably the understatement of the year. It is a seismic
political upheaval which will rock, not just the American political system, but
the entire edifice of Western liberal democracy, to its core.

Coming just months
after the Brexit referendum in which citizens of the United Kingdom voted against
all expectations to leave the European Union, which has been the lynchpin of
that continent’s peace and prosperity for nearly three-quarters of a century,
Trump’s win is, as the Financial Times declared, “another grievous blow to the
liberal international order” and “a thunderous repudiation of the status quo”.

Little captures just
how thunderous that rejection was than the fact that a national exit poll suggested that as many as 61 per cent of voters viewed Trump as “not qualified” to be
President. He is the only candidate to ever be elected who did not have a smidgen
of either governmental or military experience.

Over the coming days, there will be much soul-searching and
head-scratching over how this came to pass and what it means. But at this early
stage one thing is abundantly clear from Brexit and Trumpocalypse: large
numbers of people in the West feel they have somehow missed out despite living
in the one racial, geographic and ideological polity that more than any other
has benefited from the existing globalized system.

Demagogic campaigns on
both sides of the Atlantic profited from perceptions that the system was not
working for the people, that unaccountable governing elites had signed them up
to global trade agreements and policies, particularly on immigration, without their
consent. “Take our country back” was a
common rallying cry. Substantial portions of the unhappy population became prey
to a narrative that demonized immigrants as terrorists and free loaders and
recommended retreat from the global system as a solution to domestic woes.

Trump’s triumph highlights
fundamental questions about the structure and accountability of the post-Cold
War global order, questions that have for too long been swept under a neo-liberal
carpet. As Los Angeles Times’ journalist Vincent Bevins noted, “both Brexit and
Trumpism are the very, very wrong answers to legitimate questions that urban
elites have refused to ask for 30 years.”

The focus has tended
to be on economic growth which disproportionately benefited a few at the very top
with little attention paid to widening inequality. In the past, elites have ignored
the voices of those who lost out in globalization by, for example, hiding
behind high walls and riot police to escape anti-WTO protests in the last
decade.

This time, however, they had run out of places to hide.

There are valuable lessons
here for Kenya’s elite. Like their counterparts around the world, Kenya's punditry has predictably reacted with horror at the calamity that has befallen the US. “America does the unthinkable” wailed the Daily
Nation, which bemoaned the fact that the US electorate had rejected “a smart
politician with 30 years of experience” in favor of “a foul-mouthed casino
owner and showman with an alligator-sized ego and, reportedly, the sexual
morals of an alley cat”.

However, the fact is Kenyan
voters, faced with a system that for 50 years has functioned to enrich a small
coterie of politicians at their expense, has been regularly electing local versions
of Trump -from a president indicted for crimes against humanity to members of parliament and governors implicated in corruption and drug trafficking. Like their Western counterparts, Kenya’s ruling elite have
steadfastly ignored the demands for reform and accountability, the stark and
growing inequality and the rumblings of discontent from the masses who have
little to show for a half century of independence.

In that time, the
political system has largely functioned to legitimize the power of rulers
rather than to give voice to citizen concerns. What journalist and
constitutional lawyer, Glen Grenwald, wrote of the West following the Brexit vote is just as true here. “Instead
of acknowledging and addressing the fundamental flaws within themselves,
[elites] are devoting their energies to demonizing the victims of their
corruption, all in order to delegitimize those grievances and thus relieve
themselves of responsibility to meaningfully address them.” Few will have
forgotten President Uhuru Kenyatta’s attempts to fault ordinary Kenyans for the
failure of his administration to deal with insecurity and corruption.

As in the West, the increasingly
desperate electorate has fallen prey to populist, nativist and xenophobic
rhetoric which has tended to blame religious and ethnic minorities as well as
refugees. And elections have proven to have little to do with the ability of candidates to
actually solve problems but rather seem to produce a rogue’s gallery of the
corrupt, the bigoted and the criminal.

Democracy works when
governments are evaluated on their performance, and when citizens watch whether
governments keep their promises, and oust those that don’t measure up. Such
accountability improves the provision of public goods, boosting incomes and
welfare and reinforcing the sense of national belonging.

On the other hand,
when the citizenry feels disillusioned about its ability to meaningfully participate
in decision-making and to hold public officials to account, then politicians are
evaluated on much less noble attributes: their capacity for patronage or even to
what extent their election constitutes flashing the finger to the oligarchy –their ability to
be what film maker Michael Moore described as “your personal Molotov cocktail to throw right into the center of the bastards who did this to you!”

Trump’s election is
therefore a wakeup call. There is a crisis of accountability and inclusion in
democracies around the world and it calls us to engage in the wok of
reimagining and reforming our governance systems so they better respond to the
circumstances and problems of ordinary people rather than those of the elites
who lord it over them.